The movement of print media within a printer may require accuracy as great as 100 (ppm) parts per million; in some cases even greater accuracy may be required. This is equivalent to a margin of error of about 0.2 mils associated with a 2 inch movement of the print media.
To achieve 100 ppm accuracy, the effective radius of printer roller shafts could be tightly controlled. For example, for a typical shaft having a 0.3 inch radius, the neutral axis, i.e. the line where the rotary velocity of the shaft and the linear velocity of the print media traveling through the paper path are equal, should be within 30 micro inches (i.e. 0.3*100 ppm), a distance which is approximately 1% of the thickness of a sheet of paper. Thus, a small deviation from the desired diameter may cause a media registration error.
Increasing the diameter of the roller is a potential solution to the issue of extremely tight tolerances required of the radius of the metering roller. However, an increased diameter can result in greater inertia during operation, which results in difficulty when printing at higher speeds.
A roller with a low contact force against the print media (such as paper) could make use of a highly frictional outer surface. However, with this approach it might be more difficult to tightly control the diameter of the roller, since the diameters of highly frictional surfaces are less easily controlled.
Alternatively, using a roller with a higher contact force against the print media may result in media deformation, which induces errors in the registration process.